Roma families have been in the media spotlight [...], as child removal cases continue to hit the headlines. In two cases in Ireland, Romani children were removed and returned to their parents after their relationship was established.Authorities must take a proportionate, responsible approach to child protection, based on facts and evidence, not on racial profiling. As a matter of principle, police action based on perceived difference in physical appearance between parents and children constitutes racial profiling.Roma have been unfairly demonised and scapegoated for centuries. We call on all national authorities to act in line with their own child protection procedures, and to show responsibility and restraint.Romany journalist and former Travellers' Times editor Jake Bowers was interviewed on a number of programmes, including BBC News, regarding the outcry. He said that he was worried the alleged abduction scandal would fuel "yet another stereotype that Romani people will be beaten with."It's astounding the way that it's been reported, that there's a shock and horror that a blonde child has been found within a Romani community. It's amazing because I'm blonde, I'm blue eyed, I'm from the Roma community, and there are blonde and blue eyed people throughout the Romani community."He continued: "But the shock there is in the media is that this child, a blonde child, is being raised in a poverty-stricken, destitute environment. Yet there is no shock and there is no horror about the fact that there are millions of Romani children across Europe that live in ghettos, that live far below the European poverty line, and that receives no media coverage at all."
Trying to nail the myth that Gypsies steal children from Jake Bowers on Vimeo.
See also:
Roma fear witch hunt after Greek case
Angelique Chrisafis, Helena Smith, Philip Oltermann, Lizzy Davies, The Guardian
Seven-year-old girl taken into care did belong to Roma family in Ireland
Jonathan Brown, The Independent
Media frenzy over Roma child stealing claims unravels as new facts come to light
Mike Doherty, Travellers' Times
Roma: against discrimination and stereotyping
Cultural Synergy
Porajmos - Romani Holocaust
Wikipedia
ERGO Network for European Roma
Roma: demanding equality and human rights
Amnesty International
[T]he stereotype of the child-stealing Gypsy was reawakened in recent days when a Roma couple in Greece were jailed on accusations that they had abducted a blond, green-eyed girl called Maria — or “the blond angel” in the Greek news media. This week, two blond, blue-eyed Roma children were taken from their parents in Ireland after suspicions that they had been abducted, too.The children in Ireland were quickly returned to their families after DNA testing confirmed that the Roma were their parents. In Greece, the police confirmed on Friday that Maria was the child of a Roma couple from Bulgaria. An investigation continues into whether Maria was sold, adopted or given to the couple as they have claimed.
[...]
“Imagine if the situation were reversed and the children were brown and the parents were white, would they have ever been taken away?” said Dezideriu Gergely, the executive director of the European Roma Rights Center, based in Budapest. “The most dangerous consequence of the hysteria is that now we have to live in fear that our children can be removed from us on the basis of a wrong perception. No one should be profiled on the basis of their ethnicity.”[...]
Despite such warnings, anti-Roma sentiment appears to be spreading. Serbian news media reported this week that a group of skinheads in Novi Sad, Serbia, tried to abduct a Roma child in front of his house last weekend because his skin was fairer than that of his father, Stefan Nikolic.In Italy, the anti-immigrant Northern League responded to news of Maria’s supposed abduction this week by demanding inspections of all Roma communities to check for missing children.[...]Even before the cases, rights groups say, violence and intimidation against the Roma were intensifying. Earlier this month, a woman threw acid at a 2-year-old Roma boy and his mother in Naples, according to the European Roma Rights Center. In Hungary, at least seven Roma were killed between 2008 and 2010, and Roma leaders have counted dozens of firebomb attacks in the past.[...] [T]he head of the Greek Union of Roma, Yiannis Halilopoulos, said the sensational coverage in the Greek news media and the racial profiling that followed the removal of Maria had “taken us back 100 years.”“For the first time in years, I hear people shouting ‘Gypsies, thieves!’ when I walk down the street,” he said. He said he had also noticed more aggressive reactions to Roma who beg in the street: “Sometimes they shove them out of the way. I haven’t seen that in a long time.”
[...]
In the Czech Republic, ultraright parties and their neo-Nazi supporters this year have organized about 30 anti-Roma marches, where some have chanted, “Gypsies to the gas chambers,” rights groups said.In France, where the Roma issue has flared amid a debate over immigration, the far-right National Front has made the Roma a central issue ahead of municipal elections in March. [...]This month, President François Hollande intervened after a 15-year-old Roma girl, whose family was living illegally in France for five years, was pulled off a bus by the authorities and expelled to Kosovo. After loud protests, Mr. Hollande agreed to allow the girl to return, but only if she left her family behind.
[...]Livia Jaroka, 39, an anthropologist who has studied the Roma and is the only Roma member of the European Parliament, noted that many Roma were blighted by poor access to education and difficult health conditions. According to the European Commission, the life expectancy for Roma men in the European Union is 10 years less than the average of 76. Ms. Jaroka, who was born in Hungary, further noted that among the roughly 40 million people who were the most impoverished in Europe, the Roma were disproportionally represented.
See also:
Roma fear witch hunt after Greek case
Angelique Chrisafis, Helena Smith, Philip Oltermann, Lizzy Davies, The Guardian
Seven-year-old girl taken into care did belong to Roma family in Ireland
Jonathan Brown, The Independent
Media frenzy over Roma child stealing claims unravels as new facts come to light
Mike Doherty, Travellers' Times
Roma: against discrimination and stereotyping
Cultural Synergy
Porajmos - Romani Holocaust
Wikipedia
ERGO Network for European Roma
Roma: demanding equality and human rights
Amnesty International
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